IEEE Spectrum: High-Tech Companies Are Low-Grade Investments"In an analysis for IEEE Spectrum, Kevin J. Murphy of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California ran a simple algorithm that 'invested' US $100 in the top 1500 companies listed in Standard & Poor's in early 2002—after the dot-com crash wreaked its havoc. And, assuming the investor reinvested all the stock's dividends, Murphy tracked the portfolio's value through the end of 2009, for the 1065 companies that were still listed.

Tech performed abysmally. Of the 118 tech stocks, 79 of them didn't even beat inflation. Just picking the first 118 stocks in alphabetical order beats the tech index by 25 percent. By comparison, the 110 mining and utilities companies on Murphy's index had an average return of $285 on the $100 investment, outperforming tech's $138 return by more than two to one."

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

The great American design scientist, engineer, architect, poet, philosopher, Buckminster R. Fuller said, “When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

Frenchman, Antoine de Saint-Exupery said... “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Alexander Graham Bell, the genius who brought us the telephone said, 'The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion... It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider—and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation—persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree.'

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, understood this intrinsically, when he profoundly said, 'I respect the man who knows distinctly what he wishes. The greater part of all mischief in the world arises from the fact that men do not sufficiently understand their own aims. They have undertaken to build a tower, and spend no more labor on the foundation than would be necessary to erect a hut.'"

Crucial RealSSD C300 64GB Review | StorageReview.comThe C300 series is known for speed. The entire line of drives sees 355MB/s read speeds (265MB/s with SATA 3Gb/s interface), with slightly declining write times as capacities shrink. The 256GB model quotes 215MB/s sequential writes while the 128GB and 64GB capacities see 140MB/s and 75MB/s respectively. There's also a small power usage decline as the drives get smaller, most notably during writes. Otherwise though the family of drives are largely identical.

Scott Davis makes a case for metadata or semantic data, pointing out that it is currently used by major websites to improve their traffic or the rank of the pages searched. He is presenting the most common ways to add metadata to a document: RDFa and microformats.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

"T.J. Maxx, which is best known as a clothing retailer, caused seismic activity in the land of technophiles over the last few days by selling limited quantities of Apple's 16GB iPad with Wi-Fi for only $399, nearly $100 less than the suggested retail price....The number of actual $399 iPads in the wild might be around 80...Why would T.J. Maxx pull such a move? The phrase '15 minutes of fame' comes to mind. "

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

"...Dr Land was saying: “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.”

And Steve said: “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.” He said if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say now what do you think?

Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed – it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed — it’s a matter of discovery."

Monday, November 15, 2010

Connect to a public, unencrypted WiFi network. In other words, a WiFi network that doesn't require a password before you can connect to it.

Install Firefox and the Firesheep add-in.

Wait. Maybe have a latte while you're waiting.

Click on the user / website icons that appear over time in Firesheep to instantly log in as that user on that website. ...

what Firesheep does is relatively straightforward:

1. Listen to all HTTP traffic. 2. Wait for HTTP headers from a known website. 3. Isolate the part of the cookie header that identifies the user. 4. Launch a new browser session with that cookie. Bam! As far as the target webserver is concerned, you are that user!

All Firesheep has to do, really, is listen. That's pretty much all there is to this "hack". Scary, right? Well, then you should be positively quaking in your boots, because this is the way the entire internet has worked since 1994, when cookies were invented.

"The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a Web protocol for querying and updating data that provides a way to unlock your data and free it from silos that exist in applications today. OData does this by applying and building upon Web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) and JSON to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores. The protocol emerged from experiences implementing AtomPub clients and servers in a variety of products over the past several years. OData is being used to expose and access information from a variety of sources including, but not limited to, relational databases, file systems, content management systems and traditional Web sites."

When we started Silverlight, the number of unique/different Internet-connected devices in the world was relatively small, and our goal was to provide the most consistent, richest experience across those devices. But the world has changed. As a result, getting a single runtime implementation installed on every potential device is practically impossible.

As a result, Microsoft has embraced HTML5:

We think HTML will provide the broadest, cross-platform reach across all these devices. At Microsoft, we’re committed to building the world’s best implementation of HTML 5 for devices running Windows, and at the PDC, we showed the great progress we’re making on this with IE 9.

The Chinese Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin has achieved a performance level of 2.57 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second). This puts it in the number one spot on the 36th edition of the TOP500's world's most powerful supercomputer list

Monday, November 08, 2010

Netflix has partnered with Microsoft to create an OData API for the Netflix catalog information. This API is currently in preview mode in order to give our developers a chance to experiment with this exciting new offering. This new API provides new functionality and library support for our developers in a highly accessible form. This API is governed by the same Terms of Use as our other APIs.

This API works with any of the existing OData libraries, and provides XML and JSON formats for other languages as well

OData supports significantly more powerful queries than our other APIs

No signature is required for accessing the oData catalog

The OData API can be used separately or in combination with the Netflix API to give users a fuller experience

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

U.S. energy industry innovators unlocked the natural gas found in deep shale rock by combining and super-charging old oil industry techniques.

Pennsylvania sits atop one of the world’s largest natural gas reservoirs, promising clean energy and new jobs. But can this resource be extracted sustainably?

Mapping a Gas BoomDrillers have etched a growing mark on Pennsylvania since first producing natural gas out of its shale rock. Fifteen producing wells are in state forests, and seismic surveyors are eyeing state parks. The map and graph show the growth of shale wells in Pennsylvania from January 2007 to September 2010.

Forcing Gas Out of Rock With WaterFlares from newly completed natural gas wells paint an arresting image—a controlled test burn-off of initial gas. But the real drama takes place a mile beneath the surface.

Monday, November 01, 2010

The 2-8 (the model number indicates the 16:9 screen size) with 4GB at $100.

The 3-2 with 8GB of memory, a 1.3MP camera and VGA video recorder at $150.

The 4-3, the closest analog to the new iPod Touch, with 16GB, a microSD slot, HDMI mini out, HD video recording and a 2MP still camera running on an 800MHz chip for $200 (comparable to an 8GB Touch at $229 or 32GB at $299).

The 7-0, with 16GB of flash for $275 and a whopping 250GB hard drive for $350.